Friday, November 18, 2011

If you own a Commodore Amiga CDTV, you really owe it to yourself to play Lemmings on it, if only to see what such a game felt like on a CD-based console and the TV screen. Look, I've even found a Lemmings CDTV auction for you. I comes complete in its jewel case with instructions and the seller ships to Europe, Asia, United States, Australia, Canada.

6 comments:

So kind of you, good Gnome! And I am, as always, entirely supportive of your efforts to help people remember and experience the way these games were originally experienced - context being the better part of human experience, after all.

Lemmings! 1st game I ever played on the Amiga, and a brilliant game it is too. It was also ported to every system under the sun at the time, as I remember - including the humble Speccy - and rightly so. Everyone should have a chance to play against it's fiendish level design. Even the latter day PS3/PSP ports are damn good fun.

Shame the CDTV didn't exactly take off - but you can thank CBM & their spectacular mismanagement for that. Shame, cos it had potential as a platform. Still, the CDTV discs usually play on a CD32 and/or CD-ROM equipped Amiga.

You are once again correct wise Bob. Any Amiga with a CD drive can play the vast majority of CDTV titles, though I never knew the CD32 could also do this. Does make sense I suppose. Anything A500 compatible will usually run on the A1200.

As for Lemmings, well, they are one of my favourite games ever. Loved it on anything and everything and though I haven't tried any of modern versions on Sony's hardware, I still believe the underrated Lemmings 3D to be a great game.

I think there were a handful of CDTV titles that didn't play happily on the CD32 - but they were very few. Most likely due to clashes between the two different custom chipsets - but it's a similar situation with a handful of A500 titles that wouldn't work on the A1200. In that instance, you could run a useful program like Degrader to ensure compatibility.

As for the updated versions of Lemmings - well, Gnome - I can happily report that current Sony versions are extremely good indeed - with suitable changes for the control schemes involved - nothing radical - just appropriate tweaks to make use on analog sticks and such. They're rather lovely re-workings of a classic title. Never tried Lemmings 3D though - would be interesting to see how that one plays. It does make you think though - Lemmings came out in 1991 or so and that's when I got my A500+ and both were cutting edge. That was 20 years ago!

A thought has just occurred - now that Sony are allowing developers to release games on Playstation-suite certified Android smartphones, a touchscreen-based Lemmings would be a brilliant way to pass the time on the train. And then they could port it to the Vita as well. Who needs Angry Birds?